What Is Politics? Beyond Institutions and Elections

Politics is more than governments, elections and institutions. This article explores how feminist political thought redefines the political by connecting everyday life, care, lived experience and social relations with democracy, power and participation—revealing where political change truly begins.

Politics is often reduced to elections, governments and institutions—but this leaves much of democratic life unexplained. This article argues that power is also produced through families, schools, workplaces, migration, care and everyday experience. Drawing on feminist political theory and the realities of Eastern Europe, it explains why expanding our understanding of the political is essential for rethinking democracy, security, participation and peace in the twenty-first century.

Rethinking the Political Through Feminist Perspectives

Political analysis has long been organised around a relatively stable set of assumptions. Politics is commonly understood as the sphere of states, governments, elections, constitutions, political parties and public institutions. Democratic development is measured through institutional performance, while political participation is assessed primarily through voting, representation or engagement with formal decision-making processes.

This institutional understanding of politics has generated important knowledge. It explains how governments function, how laws are adopted and how political authority is organised. Yet it also establishes boundaries around what is recognised as political and what remains outside political analysis.

These boundaries deserve renewed examination.

Many of the processes that profoundly influence democratic life are rarely treated as central political questions. Care work, family relations, social reproduction, migration, disability, violence, fear, everyday discrimination, access to public space, memory, education and bodily autonomy are often analysed as social, cultural or private issues. Their political significance becomes visible only when they generate institutional crises or public controversy.

A feminist perspective begins from a different analytical premise. Rather than accepting inherited distinctions between public and private, political and personal, institutional and everyday, it asks how these distinctions have been constructed, whose interests they serve and what forms of power they obscure. This shift does not simply broaden the political agenda. It changes the way politics itself is understood.

The series Women in Politics: New Approaches to the Political was founded on precisely this premise: that political thought requires new analytical frameworks capable of explaining dimensions of social life that have long remained marginal within conventional political theory. Rather than treating gender as a specialised topic, the series approaches gender as a category of political analysis that makes visible relationships between institutions, everyday life and structures of power.

Politics is produced through social relations

Political institutions do not exist independently of society. They emerge from social relations and are sustained by them. Elections require citizens who believe participation matters. Constitutions depend upon public legitimacy. Rights become meaningful only when institutions recognise them and societies are willing to defend them.

Democracy therefore cannot be reduced to constitutional design or electoral procedures. It is equally constituted through everyday practices of participation, trust, recognition, cooperation and accountability.

Families, schools, workplaces, healthcare systems, migration offices, digital platforms and local communities are not external to politics. They are among the places where political relations are continuously produced and reproduced. Decisions made within these spaces influence access to resources, opportunities, security, recognition and citizenship. They shape who participates, who remains invisible and whose knowledge is considered legitimate.

From this perspective, politics is not confined to institutions. It encompasses the wider social processes through which institutions acquire meaning.

The public and the private are political categories

One of the most influential assumptions within modern political thought has been the distinction between public and private life. Liberal political theory historically associated politics with the public sphere while treating the family, intimacy and care as private domains beyond political intervention.

Feminist political thought has demonstrated that this distinction has never been neutral.

The boundaries between public and private determine which forms of labour become economically recognised, which experiences become politically visible and which forms of violence remain institutionally ignored. Domestic violence, unpaid care work, reproductive rights, sexual harassment, access to healthcare and family policy illustrate how questions traditionally assigned to the private sphere are structured by legal norms, economic systems and public institutions.

The issue is therefore not whether private life has political consequences. The issue is that the distinction itself functions as a mechanism for organising political visibility.

Understanding politics requires analysing how these boundaries are created, contested and transformed. This insight has been central throughout the Women in Politics series, which has consistently explored the relationship between the personal, the private and the public as dynamic political categories rather than fixed social realities.

Experience is a source of political knowledge

Conventional political analysis often privileges institutions, legislation and statistical indicators. While these sources remain indispensable, they cannot fully explain how political systems operate in everyday life.

A feminist epistemology proposes that lived experience constitutes an essential source of political knowledge.

Experiences of women, refugees, persons with disabilities, conscientious objectors, human rights defenders, migrants and communities living under authoritarian rule reveal how institutions function beyond their formal design. They expose the interaction between legal frameworks, administrative practices, cultural norms and informal power relations.

Individual experiences should not be understood merely as illustrations of broader processes. They provide empirical insight into the ways political structures shape everyday life and, equally, how everyday practices reproduce or challenge political structures.

Political knowledge therefore emerges through dialogue between institutional analysis and lived experience rather than through either approach alone.

Politics extends beyond the state

Expanding the concept of the political does not imply diminishing the importance of the state. Democratic institutions remain essential for guaranteeing rights, ensuring accountability and organising public authority.

However, contemporary societies increasingly confront challenges that cannot be understood exclusively through state-centred analysis.

Forced displacement, democratic backsliding, militarisation, digital surveillance, ecological crisis, structural inequality and the transformation of care systems transcend conventional institutional boundaries. They involve interactions between governments, markets, civil society, families, technologies and transnational actors.

Political analysis therefore requires analytical frameworks capable of explaining relationships across multiple scales rather than privileging state institutions alone.

This broader understanding also changes how security, democracy and peace are conceptualised. Security includes not only territorial protection but also freedom from structural violence, discrimination and exclusion. Democracy involves not only representation but also the social conditions that enable meaningful participation. Peace requires not only the absence of armed conflict but also institutions capable of preventing violence from becoming embedded within everyday life.

Eastern Europe as a producer of political theory

Political knowledge has traditionally circulated asymmetrically. Theoretical concepts have often been produced in established academic centres, while Eastern Europe has been represented primarily through empirical case studies.

Such a division no longer reflects contemporary realities.

The region’s experiences of authoritarianism, democratic transformation, militarisation, civic resistance, forced migration and peacebuilding provide conceptual resources that contribute to broader political debates. These experiences invite renewed reflection on citizenship, democracy, participation, security and political agency.

Eastern Europe should therefore be understood not only as an object of political analysis but also as a site of theoretical innovation.

For ADLIGA, this shift is fundamental. The organisation approaches the region not simply as a context requiring policy responses, but as a source of ideas capable of enriching contemporary political thought.

Towards a broader understanding of politics

The central question facing contemporary political analysis is no longer whether democracy, equality, security or peace matter. Rather, it is whether existing analytical frameworks are capable of explaining the conditions through which these values are produced, sustained and transformed.

A feminist perspective expands the concept of the political by examining relationships between institutions and everyday life, public authority and private experience, formal rights and lived realities, governance and care.

Such an approach does not replace institutional political science. It complements and extends it. By bringing previously marginalised experiences and forms of knowledge into political analysis, it enables a more comprehensive understanding of how societies function and how democratic transformation becomes possible.

For ADLIGA, rethinking politics is therefore not an academic exercise. It is a methodological commitment. Understanding contemporary societies requires analytical frameworks that recognise power wherever it is exercised, participation wherever it is practised, and political significance wherever human dignity, equality and freedom are negotiated.

Only by expanding what is understood as political can democratic societies expand what they are capable of imagining—and ultimately, of transforming.